Simple Fear
by DeejayMil
Summary: Fear is a strange, pervasive thing. Everyone has at least one thing they're afraid of, even if they're not aware of it. For the members of the MCRT, facing those fears daily is just another part of the job.


She listened to bands with names like Malevolent Melanomas and Tiptoe at Tarantulas and sleeps in a coffin, but as Abby stood in her lab with her head tilted slightly to one side examining her newest artwork, it occurred to her that she's terrified of death.

Oh, it wasn't just autopsy with its shiny surfaces reflecting every iota of her body. She could handle the crime scene photos, the blood splatters, the ballistics. They're just science broken down into its purest form. There's questions and answers in those, simple and easy.

Sometimes she played music and idly wondered what song she'd die to. That train of thought made her heart quicken and the blood pulse unpleasantly under her skin, but it _was_ thrilling. Like the exact moment a roller-coaster dipped into a dive and the ground flashed towards your face, followed by the realization that only a few bolts and frayed high tension wire held you back from oblivion. Abby screamed every time that happened.

Then she lined up and went again, still shaking from her last go around, and mouth held firmly in the rictus of a panicked smile.

She wasn't entirely sure when her fear of autopsy had leaked into a full blown phobia of her life ending, but she suspected it had something to do with the way her nightmares had changed. Now instead of waking up alone on the autopsy table, she would wake up, turn her head and Tony would be standing there with wide eyes and blood painted across his face.

It was no coincidence that she only ever went on roller-coasters in May. Sometimes facing her fears felt like the better option than living with them.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

She slept calmly with the satisfied looseness to her limbs that signified the pleasurable activities of earlier that night.

Tony watched her for a moment as he tightened his tie, the only evidence to his part in those activities in his eyes and in the thick scent that clung to his skin. He didn't even know her name and, as soon as he left her house, no doubt he'd have forgotten her face as well.

Her eyes opened and watched him as he carefully laced his shoes without meeting her gaze. No words were exchanged but her expression invited him to stay. To stop clothing himself as a shield against vulnerability, and to slip into the bed beside her and allow himself one night of comfort.

He wouldn't. He never stayed. He didn't deserve that comfort and she didn't deserve the lead on.

He'd go home to his single bed and silent apartment and sleep alone.

Alone was what he had. Alone, he was guarded.

The brisk air hit his lungs as he let himself out, and he jogged over to his car with keys held tightly in his hand. He had nothing to fear from the night.

Everything he feared was back in that room, in the woman's eyes and his heart.

DiNozzos never commit.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

The steady beat of her shoes on the pavement was as soothing to Ziva as a hot bath and wine would have been to another woman. Or perhaps, more appropriately, as soothing as screaming set to a discordant beat would be to Abby.

Ziva took a strained breath, air wheezing through the tightness in her chest as her heart thudded restlessly. It was not just the physical exertion that was causing the arrhythmia, as she fought the all-encompassing desire to look behind her.

The path she ran down flashed underneath her, darkness splashed with pools of liquid light as she raced under streetlamps, struggling to keep a steady pace against the fear that made some weak part of her mind quail.

She had nothing to fear on these streets. The strains of her work sometimes led to running as a last resort, working out the edgy restlessness a bad day would leave in her limbs.

The strains of her life sometimes led to those runs being at hours of the morning that could best be described as eccentric.

Ziva had never allowed fear to rule her, not even as a child determinedly facing the insurmountable expectations of her father.

Ahead the path dropped into blackness, the orderly line of streetlamps ending. She did not even hesitate before plunging into the dark, the only sign of her fear the slightest tightening of the skin around her mouth.

She could always do better.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Nothing frightened Gibbs, not anymore. Fear was the bastion of a man who still had something to lose. Everything he could have lost had already slipped like sand through his fingers.

He had a house and a half-finished boat, its bare, roughly hewn limbs like some sort of terrible analogy of his own life. Both were replaceable.

He had his job. Also replaceable. He'd done it before, with a beach and copious amount of bourbon to fill that slight ache it left.

He had his team.

When the man turned his gun on McGee and went to pull the trigger, Gibbs shot him twice in the head with a hand that held steady and a face that barely shifted from calm to slightly less calm. McGee didn't say anything, just swallowed heavily and nodded his thanks to his boss.

Gibbs went home that night and, just to see, pictured McGee laying on the ground with his face half blown off and innocent eyes empty and endless. Just like Kate.

By the time he'd finished vomiting there was nothing left in his stomach, and every heave felt cleansing as it burned up his throat. He told himself that the numb tingling in his arms was from the effort of holding himself over the bowl; it wasn't fear that made his guts turn to water and his extremities shake.

Nothing frightened Gibbs. Nothing he'd admit.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

The cliff was an ugly one, sheer face marred with sudden spikes of rock and scraggly bushes clinging on desperately for dear life. McGee could sympathize with their plight, the only thing between them and a sudden and messy death a few tenuous root systems and a dogged determination to live.

The surface under his foot shifted and McGee whined and pressed his face against the rock face, bile rising in his throat as his stomach dropped through his shoes. Stars burst in the dark of his closed eyelids, a vivid reminder of what would probably be the last few seconds of his existence if he screwed this up.

It took a supreme effort to turn his head to look at the girl, pushing his whole body against the cold wall. He opened his mouth to call out to her, unable to separate the sick fear from the height from the fear for the child's wellbeing. The words died on his lips, torn away by the wind, and he wavered, vision blurring with tears.

Tony was never going to let him live this down if he saw him cry.

Time stretched out into eternity as he inched his way across the ledge, spread out like a four-limbed neurotic spider. The last few shambling steps took what felt like hours until he could sink onto the narrow precipice holding the little girl, shaking so hard he thought maybe he'd bring the whole thing down.

 _And down comes baby, cradle and all_ , he hummed somewhat manically in his mind as he reached white, clammy fingers down and pressed them against the girl's neck, sagging in relief at the steady beat of her pulse against his hand. He was acutely aware that, even after help arrived to get them both the hell out of here, he was going to be revisiting this cliff nightly for months to come.

He'd do it again in a heartbeat though.

Just another day at NCIS, really. Saving lives, one terrible, nightmarish height at a time.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Everything frightened Jimmy Palmer. It wasn't so much what didn't scare him, it was what didn't. Beaches were out. Palmer had once read a study on the pathogens found in sand, and ever since then had regarded the ocean as a somewhat necessary evil that he would never subject himself to.

That was a big one. Germs. Germs were terrifying. They were tiny, innumerable and impossible to defend against, at least completely. In fact, the act of defending oneself against them could be fatal. That was terrifying.

And they were internal. They could get in his body and do all kinds of nasty things, things he wouldn't even be aware of. Things he couldn't see. Like cancer. He could have cancer at any moment, just growing inside him like a time bomb waiting to explode and take him with it.

Aneurysms. That was another. He could list all the places a brain aneurysm could strike. The bank teller, the supermarket, driving…

Driving. A giant hunk of metal that he was responsible for. Jimmy always took a moment to steady his breath before turning the ignition, praying that today wasn't the day he found himself in a twenty-car pileup with half of his body imbedded in the dash.

Oddly, being dead didn't frighten him so much. The idea was a kind of soothing. The manner of his death was more worrying.

Dogs. Snake-bite. Strangulation. A fall. A knife in the dark. Electrocution. The list was endless, and he saw the mangled remains of so many of these deaths every day at work.

Pineapples. He was also scared of pineapples. Postage stamps and their perverse desire for him to lower his guard and lick the sticky side, regardless of the consequences. Geese. Palmer had once spent five hours up a tree while the velociraptor's closest cousins meandered around the trunk and hissed at him, hatred in their beady eyes.

Taking a deep breath against the horrors that day would no doubt have in store for him, Jimmy tapped the wood of his doorframe twice for luck, and stepped out to face them.

His team was a comfort. Jimmy didn't do talking so well, but he knew people. And he could see the fears that the people around him, the people who faced their deaths every day, hid from themselves.

At least he knew what he was afraid of.


End file.
